Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (8 page)

“I really don’t know,” I replied. “The best way to deal with racism is not to be obsessed by it. It can make you paranoid and even drive you mad. It gives racists satisfaction to know they’re messing up your life. Life is simply too short to let bigots spoil its few moments of happiness with their venom.”

“But shouldn’t we fight to change people’s attitudes?” she asked.

“Yes, we should,” I said. “But let’s be realistic. For some people racism is a way of life. It’s deeply ingrained in their psyches. No amount of argument and reason will change attitudes based on ignorance and fear.”

We fell silent for a while, and continued walking through the streets of Manhattan, looking for another place to dine. Suddenly Gail looked up and said, “Do you sometimes wish I were black?”

The question surprised me and made me somewhat defensive. “I fell in love with you as you are! Why in the world would I want you to be something you’re not?”

“It would be easier for you, wouldn’t it, if I were black?” uEasier how?”

“I mean, we wouldn’t be so odd and conspicuous as a couple.

Therefore people wouldn’t mind us.”

“Why are you obsessed about what other people think?” I asked.

“I thought you were the one who said nothing matters but the way we feel about one another.”

“I did say that, and I meant it. But Mark, tell me the truth.

Doesn’t it bother you that I’m white?”

I denied that it did, but deep down I was troubled that people, especially blacks, misconstrued my reasons for dating a white. I knew that should I enter the limelight after the publication of He/fir Boy, the issue would become magnified, especially as I might be regarded as some sort of spokesperson for the antiapartheid struggle, a voice for the black community. What effect would my relationship with Gail have on my career as a writer? What sacrifices would it entail? Was I willing to make those sacrifices? Only time would tell.

The two friends I was eager for Gail to meet were Stew and Claudia, a mixed couple on Long Island with whom I lived for a summer. Stew, a black stockbroker for a major national firm, grew up in WinstonSalem, North Carolina. His wife, Claudia, an elementary school teacher from New England, was disowned by her parents for marrying Stew. They had two children whom I was sure Gail would adore.

I wanted the visit to be a surprise. As Gail and I rode the Long Island Railroad toward Bellport, she kept asking me questions about Stew and Claudia. I told her a little about each of them, but not enough to give away their races. I wanted her to meet my friends with fresh eyes and an open heart, and to assure her that we were not the only mixed couple on earth.

GAIL’S VIEW That weekend visit to Stew and Claudia’s home on Long Island was both enlightening and troubling. First of all, it gave me a glimpse into suburban married life, which made me, a young graduate student with a fear of commitment, imagine that I would suffocate in such an environment. Like many women of my generation, I had not escaped the influence of radical feminism and was convinced that marriage and a house in the suburbs were nothing more than a paralyzing trap that transforms even the most talented and energetic women into unrespected housewives and overworked mothers.

Since the day I finished Betty Friedan’s book Tie Femini Mystique my sophomore year at Brown, I vowed I would never let myself become one of those complacent women with the frozen smiles in the laundry detergent commercials who derive their happiness from seeing dirty socks turn white. I swore I would never make the same mistakes as my mother, a brilliant woman who graduated from Mount Holyoke College at twenty; taught for a year; married a minister; then gave up her career ambitions under social pressure to devote herself to the church, her children, and her husband’s career.

She ended up feeling trapped and depressed for almost two decades.

Perhaps getting involved with a black man was my way of stating to the world that I would never succumb to the stereotype of the suburban housewife dressed in pink with the fake smile on her face hugging her three blond children. Falling in love with Mark, a nonconformist who throughout life had swum against the tide, gave me the feeling of being different.

But when I met Stew and Claudia, I realized that even mixed couples settle down at some point and have a fairly normal and routine life of grocery shopping, feeding the kids, washing the cars, and mowing the lawn. It upset me to learn that even mixed couples, those rebels against society, cannot avoid the numbing effects of allAmerican family life, with its mortgage payments and church meetings and football games.

That weekend I turned twenty-three. I felt old all day long. I realized I had reached adulthood and that I should be very careful with my heart. I could not continue to fall in and out of love with men indefinitely. I felt I had to consider my relationship with Mark as potentially permanent or flee. I sensed Mark had partly taken me to Stew and Claudia’s house to test me, to see how I would react to interracial marriage. If by the end of the weekend I felt life was too hard for mixed couples, I knew I would have to break up with Mark.

It would not be fair to either of us to carry on a relationship that could not lead to marriage.

What disturbed me most about our visit was something Claudia said at dinner one night.

“A mixed couple is viewed as a black couple,” she said.

I stared at her milky skin, thin nose, and almond-shaped eyes and wondered how on earth people could consider her black.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The white woman becomes black in the eyes of the community,” she said, then went on to explain the trouble they had finding a real estate agent who would show them homes in white neighborhoods.

I stared at Stew and Claudia’s children. Both the boy and girl, Sudi and Leta, had skin the color of cafe’ all lait, dark brown eyes, and curly black hair. To the outside world they were black; their mother’s white skin would never change that. They would be as ths-ři’ criminated against and stereotyped as any black child in America.

The night was long and dark. I tossed and turned, deeply troubled. I struggled to understand how a white woman like Claudia could so willingly relinquish the love of her parents and give up her identity as a white person to become a black man’s wife and the mother of two black children. Claudia had been cut off emotionally and financially from her parents when she married Stew, had sacrificed the approval of society to be with the man she loved. I admired her strength and hoped that someday I too could learn to love as deeply and selflessly as Claudia, but that night I knew I was wavering, tossed back and forth between my strong attachment to Mark [Ix,] and my ingrained desire to please my parents and do what was expected of me. My parents still did not know I was dating a black man.

As I lay awake watching Mark sleep, I realized, with a stab in my heart that took my breath away, that I wanted a baby with pink cheeks and blue eyes someday. I wanted what many of us want: a child that reminds us of ourselves as we once were. I always pictured my child having straight blond hair and big, bright eyes. I thought, I want a baby who won’t be labeled, categort::ed, or discriminated against. It would be selllsh of me not to think of my child’s tuture.

Shouldn’t I marry a white man for my baby’s sake? It may be morally strengthening to battle societal stereotypes, but I want a baby with blue eyes.

Gaii, age four, with selfinflicted haircut.

Gaii, age twelve, in backyard of her family’s , ,,- home in Austin, Texas.

(Dr. David). Emsbergr’r) , Gail, her father, and Bianca. (Mark Mathabane) I fell asleep fantasizing about traveling through Finland and Russia, meeting strong, blond men with blue eyes. In another dream I stood in a group of tall blond Russian intellectuals on the steps of the University of Moscow.

When I opened my eyes the next morning I saw Mark’s dark handsome face kissing my lips and whispering, 0Oh, Sweets, I love you.” I threw my arms around him with more passion and vigor than ever and shut my eyes tight against his shoulder, trying desperately to force out all thoughts of race and society and blue eyes. I loved Mark, the human being, and that was all that mattered to me.

That afternoon Mark and I went for a walk on the beach, holding hands and feeling the warmth of the sun on our upturned faces. The waves rolled in rhythmically and crashed on the smooth, packed plane of sand.

Ocean blended into sky and land like one immense orb. We were sitting on the sand, half-leaning against each other, when five-year-old Leta snuck up behind us and hummed the wedding march.

“I now pronounce you man and wife,” she said in her girlish voice, grinning from ear to ear. “You may kiss the ….. . on the lips!”

Leta burst into giggles as Mark chased her around the beach trying to kiss her. “Im not the bride!” she shrieked. “You’re supposed to marry Gail! I wouldn’t marry you for all the candy in the world!”

Mark caught Leta in a bear hug and gave her a kiss. She started screaming and crying so hard she hyperventilated, then sat up laughing with tear-filled eyes.

trShes pretty smart for a five-year-old,” I said when Mark returned.

“That’s nothing,” Mark said. “When she first heard I had a girlfriend, she asked me, Does she have big boobs?”” We burst out laughing. Leta came skipping gleefully down the beach to join us. Little did we know her playful marriage pronouncement would come true, and that two and a half years later she would be the flower girl at our wedding.

That evening Stew and Claudia threw a party for Mark and invited numerous friends: writers, peace activists, Unitarians, teachers.

Mark sat on a sofa between me and bestselling romance novelist Phyllis Whitney, a small and sprightly woman in her eighties who gazed up at the young African with admiration. In the living room Gaii’s mother and Bianca playing with Nathan.

the five guests listened with rapt attention to Mark expounding his views on politics and life. I turned my attention to the eyes transfixed on him.

At such moments, I sensed that Mark was too overpowering for me, too much the focus of attention, too strong and talkative and persuasive.

I wondered if my own identity, still developing and tentative, could flourish beside his. I sometimes felt a need to be away from him in order to grow.

After the crowd dispersed and we were alone together, I watched Mark read beside me, his head nodding sleepily and his short curly eyelashes shutting his tired eyes, and thought how much I loved him, though I loved in an envious, competitive, adoring, worshiping way, constantly wracked with doubts about our future as an interracial couple.

I did not understand the complexities of interracial love, because I was, for the most part, unaware of what it meant to be black in America. Like most whites, I rarely had to concern myself with race issues. My knowledge of civil rights and the 1960s had taught me that racial tensions could explode into riots and bloodshed, and talking to frustrated and embittered blacks in Harlem and black teenage mothers in the South Bronx had enlightened me further, but I still could not grasp what it truly meant to be discriminated against or oppressed simply because of one’s skin color and the texture of one’s hair.

In an attempt to think and feel, if only briefly, like a black person, I began reading the works of black writers: Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Claude Brown.

A certain line in Baldwin’s Tie flre Next Time struck me: “He was defeated long before he died because at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.” It was then I realized that color consciousness is deeply rooted not only in whites, but in blacks as well. When you are treated all your life as an inferior being, it is easy to believe you are indeed inferior.

As I walked across the Columbia campus in the early spring of 1985 I began encountering groups of people gathered in tight circles, deeply involved in heated discussions, around card tables labeled Coalition for a Free South Africa. Their tables attracted considerable attention, and soon I saw a large number of students, both black and white, wearing the colors of the African National Congress and pins reading Free Mandela. I sensed they were up to something.

On April 3, 1985, on the seventeenth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr I saw a huge group of students gathering on the steps of Hamilton Hall, the main administration building. It was around eleven o’clock on a crisp, sunny spring morning. Out of curiosity I slipped through the crowd to see what was happening.

Students had just finished wrapping a silver-link chain around the door handles. The building was barricaded for the first time since the student protests of 1968.

“What’s this all about?” I asked a young man clad in faded jeans and wearing a huge Free South Africa button.

“We want Columbia to stop supporting apartheid,” he said. “This university has thirty-three million dollars worth of stocks invested in companies that do business in South Africa. We’re not unlocking this building until they dump those stocks. Some of the people here are on a hunger strike. They haven’t eaten in two weeks. If you support us, boycott your classes. We’re not leaving these steps until President Sovran listens to us.”

For weeks they camped out on the steps, made tents to protect themselves from the rain, kept warm in cold weather by staying in their sleeping bags all day. The massive divestment protest lasted all month, received national media coverage, and sparked similar protests at universities across the country.

Our professors at the journalism school warned us from getting involved in the protest.

“A good journalist has to be objective,” one of the deans said sententiously. We were assembled in the World Room for a special meeting, and he spoke from behind a podium. We could hear the protesters chanting at the rally below the window. “In a political controversy, you cannot advocate only one side,” he said. “You must present a balanced vIew. You have to be professionals. You should weigh the statements made by the trustees against the slogans those students are shouting in that uproar out there.”